How the All-Star Game lost all meaning (2002)

...and how baseball homogenized itself.

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I.

Twenty-three years ago, the commissioner of baseball engaged in a ham-handed attempt to remedy a problem of his own making. It began in the summer of 2002, when a game that Bud Selig had helped to render increasingly meaningless—the All-Star Game between the American and National Leagues—ended in a 7-7 tie. It then somehow got even worse in the following offseason, when Selig—who, as an (essentially) active owner of a major-league team, was the most conflicted commissioner in baseball history—convinced every other owner in baseball that the way to bring true meaning back to the All-Star Game was to give the winning league home-field advantage in the World Series.

Did this solution make any kind of logical sense? No, it did not. It was like attempting to repair your air-conditioning system by pumping your tires full of lead. It was like declaring that the year’s most lucrative Marvel movie would get an automatic Oscar nomination. But this did not stop Bud Selig from embracing big ideas, even if they were wrong. At a moment when baseball was working its way back from the 1994 strike and the ensuing steroid scandal, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the sport had to adapt to the 21st century. Selig was going to be bold, even if he was often dead wrong.

One of the biggest ideas Selig had was to normalize interleague play between the American and National Leagues. Interleague play was a good idea, to a point; it became a less-good idea when it got so pervasive that it ceased to mean much of anything anymore. And in setting interleague play on a path to where it now holds little to no cache, Selig also blew up the uniqueness of the All-Star Game (which then made him push through the very dumb idea of attempting to force meaning upon the All-Star game).

A few years ago, baseball approved a universal designated hitter, which ushered us into an era where there is literally zero difference between the American and National Leagues. And all of that leaves us here, trapped in a limbo of Bud Selig’s making, where the American and National Leagues are so homogeneous that it’s hard to even remember a time when baseball was the one sport where two leagues had their own unique identities.

The All-Star game means nothing now; it is the sad trombone punctuating the most boring sports week of the entire year. And yet it is worth remembering why it was once the only game of its kind that used to matter, and what it says about baseball, then and now

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II.

In 1970,¹ a young accounting professor at Boston College took a job working as the controller at the American League office. That professor, John Harrington, was naïve and new to baseball; his boss was the “ultraconservative” Joe Cronin, a Hall of Fame shortstop who’d spent most of his career playing for the Red Sox. And every year when the World Series and the All-Star Game came around, something odd happened: Cronin would become furiously competitive. He hated losing to the National League, resented its perceived arrogance as the “senior circuit,” would get so heated at longtime NL president Chub Feeney that he often couldn’t even bring himself to speak to him.

“I loved it,” Harrington — who became co-architect of baseball’s interleague proposal as CEO of the Red Sox in 1996 — told me from his home on Cape Cod. “I couldn’t believe the intensity. Cronin and Feeney were worlds apart in their approach to the game.”

It took several decades and multiple missteps by the National League, but by 1901, the American League had formed as its chief rival. And by the time the leagues made tenuous peace in 1903, and set up the first World Series that same year, they had separate offseason meetings, and separate rules (the foul strike, Thorn notes as an example, was adopted by the NL in 1901 and by the AL in 1903). There were still exhibition games between the leagues, but the notion of regular-season interleague play became anathema as the leagues began to cling to their own identities. And through sheer momentum, that idea carried on for nearly a century.

No other professional sport had anything remotely like this. There was incredible contentiousness between the AFL and the NFL, but then they merged, and now there is no fundamental difference between the AFC and NFC except the television network that airs their games on Sunday afternoons. (This is also why the Pro Bowl is the dumbest event on the NFL calendar.) The NBA and the NHL essentially have conferences for the express purpose of minimizing travel and determining playoff seeding (and their All-Star games are equally frivolous).

Yet baseball had two leagues that carried a fundamental animosity for each other, even when no one was old enough to remember exactly how in the hell it started. They existed on separate tracks for the entire summer. And why was it that way? Because it had always been that way. In the 1940s, Bill Veeck, the bohemian owner of the Cleveland Indians, brought up the notion of interleague play (his father, Bill Veeck Sr., had first raised the notion in the 1930s), and it got nowhere; in 1973, Selig, as a young owner in Milwaukee inspired by Veeck’s unconventional thinking, raised it once more — he even called it the “Feeney Plan” to pacify the ego of the National League president.

“We were going to have six games right before or after the All-Star Game,” Selig told me. “And by God, we got to the summer meetings here in Milwaukee, and the American League voted unanimously for it, and the National League voted it down.”

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III.

This is one reason why the baseball All-Star Game felt like it held some actual weight (and why Selig’s attempts, post-interleague play, to prop the game up by imposing meaning upon it by awarding home-field advantage in the World Series to the winner, rang so hollow): Because it was both a manifestation of that rivalry and a unique occurrence, an opportunity for fans to see the matchups between pitchers and hitters who may not have otherwise crossed paths. It was, in the age of limited television exposure, a momentary violation of taboos.

“It’s like saying if you compare a virginal Victorian dame to a stripper — the more clothing, the more mystery,” said MLB official historian John Thorn, who, unlike Selig, feels that interleague play’s primary negative impact has been to dilute the purpose of the All-Star Game. “I’m in the odd position of being an advocate for the mystery. It’s as though I showed up to a strip joint and was the only one yelling, ‘Put it on, put it on, put it on!’”

But over time, as television’s reach grew, as information became more readily available, the idea of that virginal separation between the leagues began to feel more and more quaint. And then came the 1994 work stoppage that canceled the World Series, and baseball’s internecine fights began to seem like more of a liability than a strength. In the aftermath, all that tradition for tradition’s sake began to seem foolish, particularly when it didn’t benefit the sport’s paying customers. This helped allow Selig to expand the playoffs and to impose revenue-sharing measures and smooth over labor disputes and preside over the construction of an entire generation of retro-chic ballparks. And it allowed the owners to finally acknowledge that there was no good reason not to have interleague play.

Amid all these advances, baseball finally consolidated in 1999, shuttering its American League and National League offices and confining the operation to one New York skyscraper. The title of “league president” is now largely honorary. The Brewers jumped from the AL to the NL in 1998; the Astros jumped from the NL to the AL in 2013. What it all means, Thorn tells me, is that there is no rivalry between the leagues anymore — there isn’t any fundamental difference in the way they operate or the way they view each other, particularly now that they compete against each other every day of the season.

And so here we are, trapped in the most meaningless sports week of the entire year.